There
is no similarity between the corporate media and a “free press.” The
corporate media operates according to its structural make up, which
requires it to serve the interests of ownership and maximize profits. Its
top down style of management ensures that it will align itself with the
political centers of power, which create the opportunity for greater
prosperity. This explains why the media giants have consistently concealed
the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties, supported the
expansion of executive power, and paved the way for global war. After all,
they are just acting in their own best interest, accommodating the
political establishment to allow for more consolidation and expansion. One
hand washes the other.

The cozy relationship between the
administration and the media has made it nearly impossible to tell where
one ends and the other begins. In fact, the media is the primary
instrument of state policy. Its task is to shape the public’s perception
of government and to project a benign image of the US to the world beyond.

Naturally, this symbiotic relationship has
intensified as the needs of the administration have increased. Now, the
media crafts the storyline of American magnanimity while the US military
carries out war crimes in Falluja or torture in Baghdad. It showers praise
on the Dear Leader while thousands wallow in squalor in New Orleans or are
cluster-bombed in Tal Afar. It waves the flags and sings the patriotic
anthems that prepare the nation for war. The media has become
indistinguishable from the political establishment; executing its duties
in a manner that best serve the objectives of the state.

Confidence in the media has never been
lower. A broad section of the public doesn’t believe anything they read in
the papers nor do they see reporters as impartial observers of world
events. This should be no great surprise. The model of a privately owned
media ensures that the facts are massaged to suit ownership,; a practice
that inevitably undermines credibility.

The marriage between the media and the state
increases the danger to the public interests. This is especially true when
the media becomes a marketing tool for the government, promoting its
vastly unpopular wars, its attacks on the social safety net, and its
vicious assault on civil liberties.

The media has become an adversary to the
people it is supposed to serve. It now functions exclusively as a weapon
in the imperial arsenal; exalting the state and its wartime agenda, while
savaging the institutions of democracy and personal liberty. Its role as
state-propagandist is conspicuous in everything from its blind devotion to
the president to its obfuscation of facts that discredit the
administration.

If we consider a few of the critical stories
the mainstream media suppressed, we get a clearer idea of its overall
agenda.

The media refused to cover the allegations
of irregularities in the 2004 presidential election, dismissing the
anomalies as conspiracy theories. Independent investigations have cast
serious doubt on the legitimacy of the balloting, and just last week, the
GAO confirmed suspicions that widespread voter fraud may have taken place.
Whether or not the elections were fairly conducted is immaterial; given
the suspicious results of the 2000 election, this was a story that should
have been covered. Instead, it was purposely ignored to silence critics
and divert attention from the dysfunctional electoral system.

The media has refused to cover the massive
and devastating siege of Falluja; an assault that displaced 250,000
civilians and intentionally destroyed water lines, electrical power,
sewage treatment plants, government buildings, hospitals and schools. Even
now, a full year later, journalists have been kept from entering the city
or photographing the largest single war crime of the ongoing conflict.
And, even though news services around the world are
confirming the use of banned weapons, including napalm and other
“unidentified” substances during the attack, the American media refuses to
give details or demand an independent investigation. It is interesting to
compare the media’s silence on the carnage in Iraq to its front-page
coverage of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri. Lavish attention has been devoted to Hariri’s death because it
advances the administration’s foreign policy goals. Once again, the media
is clearing the path for future imperial conflicts by building the case
for war against Syria.

The media has also refused to cover the
Downing Street Memo; the damning document written by a member of Tony
Blair’s national security team which verified that Bush planned to “remove
Saddam through military force” as early as July 2002 (even though the
administration was saying that that it would “exhaust all peaceful means”)
The unprovoked attack would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy.”

Even though the memo provided the first
piece of irrefutable evidence that the administration deliberately
manipulated the facts, no American newspaper referred to the memo for more
than seven weeks after its discovery. The details of the Downing Street
Memo are still unknown to many Americans, allowing Bush to continue to
deny the cherry picking of pre-war intelligence. The memo proves that Bush
is lying.

The media has also refused to provide any
coverage of the mercenaries who were deployed to the streets of New
Orleans following
Hurricane Katrina. This is the first time in American history that a
foreign (corporate) army has carried out operations on US soil. The media
made sure that no photos of these corporate warriors appeared in any of
the newspapers or TV programs. The absence of coverage raises serious
questions about censorship in Bush’s America.

The media refuses to provide news of the
Iraq war and the
devastation of Sunni heartland. Al Qaim, Husbaya, and Tal Afar have
all been attacked with the same ferocity as Falluja, forcing the
townspeople to flee and then destroying the water, electricity, sewage and
other critical parts of the infrastructure. The Pentagon is now engaged in
a scorched earth strategy knowing full well that its policy of killing
journalists will keep the story from being reported. The obliteration of
these cities shows that the military has abandoned the idea of achieving a
political solution in Iraq. The present strategy is aimed at “destroying
the resistance’s ability to wage war,” by systematically laying to waste
one city after another. This is the Rumsfeld solution, but you won’t find
it in the media.

The news from Iraq focuses entirely on the
random acts of violence that perpetuate racial stereotypes of Islamic
extremists. This provides the justification for the continuing American
occupation. The media has worked in conjunction with the Pentagon to
create the story of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the embodiment of a ruthless
Muslim fanatic who kills simply because he “hates freedom.”

No one can categorically deny that Zarqawi
may exist. The fact is, however, that there has
never been a positive identification of him, nor has anyone ever
provided concrete proof of his whereabouts. Reporters are responsible to
provide the facts to their readers, not to promote a narrative that
suits the Pentagon’s agenda.

These are just a few of the stories that the
media has refused to cover because they conflict with the goals of the
administration. If we look deeper we see that the Cheney Energy papers,
the 9-11 “whitewash, the corporate scandals, the “Able Danger” program,
and the attacks on civil liberties, have all met a similar fate. Stories
that are incompatible with the aims of ownership or administration policy
are usually left on the cutting room floor.

Freedom is impossible where the information
systems are monopolized by private industry. Democracy requires that
people have access to divergent points of view so they can form opinions
free from coercive influences. The corporate model aims at uniformity in
order to limit the range of debate and promote a business-friendly agenda.
In America, the news has become a study in uniformity, presenting the very
same topics from precisely the same perspective. This creates the
impression that the facts are generally agreed upon, which is not the
case. 65% of the American people do not support the media’s pro-war
stance, and yet, the anti-war position is nowhere to be found on
commercial TV.

The war on terror is not simply a misguided
crusade against non-state actors like Al Qaida. It is a sweeping plan for
global corporate domination. Managing information is vital to that effort.
Knowledge is power, and there is a deliberate attempt to seize that power
by controlling the sources of information. In effect, it is the
privatization of the truth; standardizing information through greater
media consolidation and disseminating it through its own filtering
systems. Its inhibiting effects on our democracy have already been seen in
the curtailing of civil liberties and the twisting of facts that led to
the Iraq war. The further merging of the state and the media portend a
strengthening of autocratic government and a loss of personal liberty.

The multi-headed dragon of corporate media
must be confronted and defeated. Al Qaida may pose a threat to our
security, but the alliance of state and media poses a clear and present
danger to our freedom.